Chris Price, open source strategist for SDN, cloud and NFV at Ericsson, and Mike Perez cross-project developer coordinator at the OpenStack Foundation, talk to Superuser TV about the how they are working with adjacent technologies and on simplifying OpenStack.

Perez says that the variety of features in OpenStack with numerous configuration options have slowed things down for many potential users. His work on some aspects of this are so new that there’s been a lot of confusion. “I’ve heard people say, ‘someone’s working on this new thing — this guy Mike, a guy called Perez and there’s someone who goes by Thingee — and those three people are all me.” But, he says, that hasn’t cogged the machine — they pushed 18 patches in one day — though there’s a lot of work left to do.

“We have options that are deprecated all the way from Folsom that are still existing in code,” Perez says. “But a lot of them are gone, as of today.”

Price says that so far they’ve learned there’s a lot of good capability and features in the OpenStack community on offer to other communities. “We’ve also learned that we have some work to do to make it relevant. There’s investment and activity into bringing those technologies forward and make them more consumable.”

As for what’s next, Perez says it may be more hands-off than on. “We have a lot of different initiatives, some tie into these adjacent technologies where we’re kind of competing with other communities where it makes sense for them to go ahead and develop what they’re good at and allow us to focus on what we’re good at with infrastructure.”

To get involved, you can reach out to Perez on IRC or Twitter, where his handle is Thingee or over email: mikeATopenstack.org